Christina Ricci was a child actor in the early 1990s, making commercials for cereal and toys beginning at age 5. Her first film, at age 9, was Mermaids with Cher and Winona Ryder. She made more of an impression as morbid daughter Wednesday in the Addams Family movies, as the manipulative girlfriend of murderous hooker Charlize Theron in Monster, and opposite Johnny Depp's Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow.

She was always a cute, slightly chubby kid, and even played a younger version of Rosie O'Donnell's character in Now and Then. Her co-star in that film, 13-year-old Thora Birch, played a young Melanie Griffith, and you would not have to be a sensitive adolescent to recognize what was being telegraphed about Ricci's future. Ricci has said that by her mid-teens, she felt completely removed from any ordinary semblance of reality. Her parents divorced while she was making Addams Family Values, and she reportedly no longer speaks to her father. In a 1998 interview, when Ricci was 17, she rolled up her sleeve to show the reporter a long series of purple burn marks on her arm. "I wanted to see if I can handle pain... It's sort of an experiment to see if I can take it."

As an adult, Ricci says the anorexia is behind her. She describes herself as "hermit-like" and prefers watching reruns of Law & Order to the glitter of show-biz nightlife. She prefers to work in independent films, finding them better written and more intelligent than Hollywood blockbusters. She says she won't consider scripts that offend her, but the only things that seem to truly offend her are poorly-written scripts and overwrought melodrama. She reportedly turned down the little-girl role in Spielberg's Jurassic Park, and the Kate Winslet role in Titanic.